Killeen Mall Play Area Better Than Halloween Candy
Killeen Mall Play Area Better Than Halloween Candy
“We opened on October 31 and we had tons of kids here in their costumes,” says Mardi Peaster, Killeen Mall’s Senior Marketing Specialty Leasing Manager with Jones Lang LaSalle. “I heard some kids say, ‘I don’t want to go trick or treating! I want to stay and play!’”
Killeen Mall is located in Killeen, TX, home of Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base, which means that the shopping center serves a large number of soldiers and their young families.
“We have a lot of little children!” says Peaster. “We have 47.6% more kids under five years old than the national average.”
Serving those families is a responsibility and an honor, says Peaster, who says Killeen Mall offers free monthly children’s programs, and a good mix of retail for children, teens and adults, but never had a play area before.
Recently, the mall’s owners and developer Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) decided to create a play area for the community. And, because JLL has a long relationship with Soft Play, LLC, they chose Soft Play to design, manufacture and install the mall play area.
However, unlike many play area design processes, in which developers and owners select the theme, the Killeen community was asked to select their new play area’s theme.
“We got it down to three final designs and then we did an online contest through Facebook and we also took votes in person at the mall,” says Peaster. “It was cool to see parents bring their kids in so that they could vote, too. Otherwise, most kids wouldn’t have been able to vote on Facebook.”
The three themes for Killeen Mall were: woodsy, southwest and transportation.
“We took votes for three weeks and it narrowed down to two themes for the play area really fast,” says Peaster. “It was between woodsy and transportation. They were neck-and-neck up until the last day and it came down to just a 10-vote difference.”
The transportation theme won!
Once Killeen Mall’s theme was selected, Soft Play immediately got to work creating the play area. Based on the community’s feedback, Soft Play even altered the entrance sign to include a soldier from the First Cavalry, who stands at attention sharing the rules of the playground. The original design included a policeman.
The play area was installed during the last week of October and opened on October 31.
“The play area has definitely increased traffic,” says Peaster. “We’ve received lots of great word-of-mouth marketing and people are talking about it on Facebook. Our retailers are happy.”
